Pretty arable

While it's the butt of a fair few jokes from action-orientated gamers, the PC Farming Simulator series has been steadily growing a vast crop of fans thanks to its no nonsense, tech-heavy take on the world's second oldest industry.

This mobile version takes an understandably more streamlined approach, but with no animals to tend to and no other players to interact with it's a dry effort that's marred by weak presentation and some grating bugs (like looping music that stubbornly refuses to be turned off).

I've got an un-driveable combine harvester

Basic gameplay involves you planting, harvesting, or selling crops using your trusty tractor and harvester combo, which can be jumped between by tapping an icon, so anyone with a knowledge of Old MacDonald should be to make a modest virtual wheat empire.

The problem is, even when you understand how the supply chain works, the practical process of farming is a chore the game seems determined to make harder than necessary.

Your two main vehicles, a tractor and harvester, are the controlled using adjustable speed and direction toggles that seem simple in principle, but the over-sensitive steering means you'll spend a lot of time bouncing off scenery and carving haphazard zigzags into lush fields of crops.

Most actions, from attaching extra equipment to vehicles and delivering produce, require precise movement, so driving like you've been hitting the homebrew cider a little too hard is a serious problem.

This is further compounded by a juddering frame-rate and an awkwardly high camera angle that never lets you see more than a few feet ahead - not that the angular, '90s-style, 3D graphics are worth more than a glance.

Blinkers on

Combine this limited viewpoint with a tiny, zoomed-in map, and navigating your farm and the nearby town that make up the open-world design becomes an exercise in frustrating guesswork.

Helpfully, some actions - like sowing and harvesting - can be automated, but this leaves you with little to do but potter around selling your wares to try and save enough to expand your farm or buy one of the vehicles modelled on their real-world counterparts.

Occasional bonus missions pop-up, such as racing to find some missing tomatoes on the map, but the whole Farming Simulator Casual Edition mobile experience stills feels more like thankless work than an actual game.